More research on ‘dying healthy’ will also help us live healthier

ByGeorge J. AnnasandSandro Galea

October 3, 2018

Fanny Godin, a Belgian supercentarian, died at age 112, a few years shy of the upper limit of human longevity.NICOLAS LAMBERT/AFP/GettyImages

Helping people live longer has been a central goal of medicine for decades. The quest to extend life raises an interesting question: Should we keep investing in research aimed at adding even more years to the already impressive gains in the average life expectancy that occurred during the 20th century?

We can only go so far. There’s likely an unalterable biological limit to the human life span, somewhere around 115 years (though there are, of course, occasional outliers). Virtually all humans die before reaching that age, most of them before they turn 90.

This limit should give us pause.

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As we wrote in Annals of Internal Medicine, the 21-year gain in life expectancy during the first half of the 20th century emerged mainly from public health initiatives like improved sanitation, access to clean water, and safer food. The development of vaccines and improvements in medical care drove the smaller nine-year increase in the second half of the century. But these aren’t likely to be replicated.

Advances in medical treatment, including cancer treatments, are increasingly unlikely to provide further significant gains in human longevity. An analysis of 71 cancer drugs consecutively approved between 2001 and 2012, for example, suggests that their overall contribution to survival was just 2.1 months; the gains attributable to personalized cancer medicine have, so far, also been minimal.

Lacking evidence that the human life span can be radically increased by new medical technologies, we believe it’s time to shift our country’s investment priorities away from medical research that aims to extend life and instead focus on the same social, cultural, and political factors that successfully prolonged life in the last century.

That means more public investment in education, transportation, and housing. That kind of investment would directly contribute to the prevention of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and many cancers, and would do more to improve the quality of life of the population than additional medical research aimed at treating individuals with specific diseases.

Don’t get us wrong. We aren’t suggesting that we should eliminate funding for medical research to try to prevent, or even cure, diseases. Instead, we are suggesting that public funding should emphasize research on improving and sustaining quality of life rather than focusing on increasing length of life. This means giving greater priority to diseases that affect decades of people’s lives, such as arthritis, autism, macular degeneration, and Alzheimer’s disease over end-of-life diseases like extreme dementia and many cancers.

It also means implementing new approaches to make death and dying as humane as possible. While medicine is slowly accepting palliative care, it is often seen as a byproduct of medical failure, something to make death less difficult only because we could not prevent it. Fully accepting the inevitability of death is worth studying further. It is also important to acknowledge dying with dignity as a concern for population health, not just medical care for individual patients.

One way to preserve quality of life throughout the life span is to compress aging-related illness and disease into as short a time as possible.

Others before us have suggested that the U.S. is now at the point of diminishing returns in high-tech medicine. Unfortunately, calls to redirect resources away from research into extending life and toward quality of life have been ignored in the past, and the same will likely happen now. We believe that is a mistake.

The more I read this article and its links, the more I think about the hopeless prognoses originating in the medical world. Much of the talk provided could prove irrelevant if health doctors participated in the aging healthyconversation. Until we reach the stage when health care is called medical care as it should, academics just tinker around the edges. They fail to perceive the need for professional health advisers. l refer to the yet-not-existing breed of doctors trained in health school. Medical professionals try to envision a health panorama without having learned and practiced a scientifically designed healthy lifestyle. The result is a flow of an underlying medical influence that feels out of place with health and the realities of this world.
If you want to fix the world, manage to structure a reliable health science, and push for it to be taught in universities’ health schools. Then we can start talking about healthy age expansion and its limits. The thought of medicine creating a healthy world makes me think of an extraterrestrial enterprise, not the earthly reality we need.

Too bad helping people live longer is no longer a central goal of medicine thank’s to Hospice/Palliative care practicing Stealth Euthanasia on people who aren’t even terminal. People who want treatment, not death, but all they’re getting is death. Overdosed, dehydrated and starved. Hows that for treatment? Many Doctors no longer try to save lives. Their greed get’s in the way!

As a relatively healthy and moderately active and insatiably curious 74-year-old, I heartily applaud your goals. Unfortunately, money drives big medicine and big pharma which would fight aggressively against such a commonsense approach that would eat into their profits.